She hasn’t said a word in hours.
Neither have I.
I know she’s still stewing over her discovery and my response. And for a heartbeat, I wonder, unsettlingly, if I’ve gone too far.
The thought alarms me.
I don’t go too far. I calculate. I adapt and I survive.
Even with her. Hell, especially with her.
And yet, as she watches me like she’s trying to map the man behind the mask, I feel the same disorientation I saw on her face earlier mirrored back at me, sharp and unexpected.
I want to laugh, not because it’s funny but because it’s absurd.
Because the woman I married, the one person I didn’t test before putting a ring on her finger, is now the only variable I can’t fully predict.
And that should terrify me.
Instead, it does something far worse.
It makes me curious.
I meet her gaze, letting her see just enough of what I am to keep her guessing, because uncertainty keeps people close, and closeness, real closeness, is the most dangerous thing of all.
The loan will do what it’s meant to do. Her uncles will either stand or break.
And Lucia?
She will learn.
About my empire. About the lines that blur. About the truth that there is no clean separation between protection and possession in my world.
The question is not whether she’ll survive it.
It’s whether she’ll ever stop fighting it.
And whether I want her to.
13
LUCIA
We end the night with a layer of tension between us, despite him yanking me into his arms and keeping me pinned to his side all night long.
Despite peaceful sleep overriding my annoyance and churning alarm.
And when he drawls at the breakfast table, “Wanna come into work with me today? See I’m not the absolute monster you think me to be?” the temptation is too fierce to resist.
Giovanni’s office is nothing like I expected.
I don’t know what I imagined—dark wood and shadows, maybe, men murmuring over maps with pins stabbed into cities—but what I find instead is light, glass, screens, and motion. Everything hums with purpose. Calls are taken and ended. Decisions ripple outward with the soft inevitability of tides.
I sit in the corner on a leather chair that probably costs more than my first car, watching my husband work.
He doesn’t posture and he doesn’t raise his voice.
He listens, asks precise questions, then delivers conclusions that sound less like orders and more like inevitabilities people are relieved to obey.
